This is our CD platform. We use TFS for gated-checks and release builds. A release build packages all our components, pushes these packages to Octopus and triggers a release into our Development environment. A suite of integration tests are run and finally if all is successful the team gets a notification on Slack that a new release is available. This can then get promoted through all our non-production environments, Finally, we use offline deployments as we are not yet allowed to promote all the way to production from Octopus. Offline deployments are great as they allow us to retain our tried and tested deployment process but instead, humans become the tentacles when deploying in prod and pre-prod. Octopus Deploy

We recently added new APIs to Jira to associate information about Builds and Deployments to Jira issues.

The new APIs were developed using a spec-first API approach for speed and sanity. The details of this approach are described in this blog post, and we relied on using Swagger and associated tools like Swagger UI.

A new service was created for managing the data. It provides a REST API for external use, and an internal API based on GraphQL. The service is built using Kotlin for increased developer productivity and happiness, and the Spring-Boot framework. PostgreSQL was chosen for the persistence layer, as we have non-trivial requirements that cannot be easily implemented on top of a key-value store.

The front-end has been built using React and querying the back-end service using an internal GraphQL API. We have plans of providing a public GraphQL API in the future.

This is our CD platform. We use TFS for gated-checks and release builds. A release build packages all our components, pushes these packages to Octopus and triggers a release into our Development environment. A suite of integration tests are run and finally if all is successful the team gets a notification on Slack that a new release is available. This can then get promoted through all our non-production environments, Finally, we use offline deployments as we are not yet allowed to promote all the way to production from Octopus. Offline deployments are great as they allow us to retain our tried and tested deployment process but instead, humans become the tentacles when deploying in prod and pre-prod. Octopus Deploy

Octopus Deploy Alternatives & Comparisons

In a nutshell Jenkins CI is the leading open-source continuous integration server. Built with Java, it provides over 300 plugins to support building and testing virtually any project.

Ansible

Ansible is an IT automation tool. It can configure systems, deploy software, and orchestrate more advanced IT tasks such as continuous deployments or zero downtime rolling updates. Ansible’s goals are foremost those of simplicity and maximum ease of use.

TeamCity

TeamCity is a user-friendly continuous integration (CI) server for professional developers, build engineers, and DevOps. It is trivial to setup and absolutely free for small teams and open source projects.

Chef

Chef enables you to manage and scale cloud infrastructure with no downtime or interruptions. Freely move applications and configurations from one cloud to another. Chef is integrated with all major cloud providers including Amazon EC2, VMWare, IBM Smartcloud, Rackspace, OpenStack, Windows Azure, HP Cloud, Google Compute Engine, Joyent Cloud and others.

Bamboo

Focus on coding and count on Bamboo as your CI and build server! Create multi-stage build plans, set up triggers to start builds upon commits, and assign agents to your critical builds and deployments.